Abstract: This paper presents a research on two tree-based on-demand multicast routing protocols, namely ADMR and MAODV. It analyzes the influences of different tree structures and different tree maintenances on the performance of these two protocols and draws a conclusion. A comparative performance evaluation of these protocols under different MANET scenarios is given by the ns2 platform. Simulation results further verifies the analytic results. The following conclusions can be drawn from the simulation results that the shared tree structure and the routing overheads of tree maintenance form the bottleneck of MAODV and that ADMR has a higher PDR and a shorter delay.

Key words: Ad Hoc networks, multicast routing, routing protocols